Missile Defense

HUNTSVILLE, ALA — In a one-story gray building with a bright red pin striping about two-thirds of the way up its side, a nondescript 70,000 square-foot factory sits behind three 21-foot tall missiles. Tucked inside the fences of the Redstone Arsenal — a sprawling Army base just minutes from downtown Huntsville — is where defense giant Raytheon assembles ship-launched missile interceptors,…

If a US combatant commander stationed somewhere around the globe feels that the one thing the command is missing is the ability to detect missiles, airplanes and drones hundreds of miles away, the US Army has just what they’re looking for. Almost a decade after it first began development—and just two years after a 2012…

Congressional GOP hawks agree on one thing: To them, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade the southern-most part of Ukraine is US President Barack Obama’s fault. They also agree the US should send Putin a message. But a Senate measure intended to do just that is pitting hawk vs. hawk.

Deciphering the Pentagon’s 2015 spending proposal has been difficult, but Defense News has some charts the could serve as a decoder ring. Out friends at VisualDoD helped us compile data from the Defense Department’s spending plan to create these detailed graphics, which tell a story on their own. First, the chart at the top of…

A US Patriot missile that accidentally fired during a 2007 training exercise in Qatar landed several miles away in the backyard of the Middle Eastern nation’s top military officer, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new book reveals. At the time, numerous reports simply stated that the missile had landed on a farm. Gates’ book, “Duty: Memoirs…

In a striking Saturday night announcement, a team of international negotiators and Iran announced that the two sides had hammered out a deal to temporarily halt the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for modest rollbacks of American-led economic sanctions against elements of the Iranian economy. “We have reached an agreement,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad…

While Congress debates the merits of spending tens of millions of dollars to add missile interceptors on the East Coast while increasing the number already in place out West, a long-running developmental Army radar system is packing up and heading for Maryland. From May 4 to June 14, Raytheon’s JLENS, or Joint Land Attack Cruise…

Four senior pro-defense US Republican lawmakers have identified what they believe to be one of the chief culprits of a recent Pentagon missile test failure: Barack Obama. In a letter sent Friday to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the Republican lawmakers accuse the Democratic president and his administration with putting the Pentagon’s ground-based midcourse defense (GMD)…

The full U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to begin debate of the House Armed Services Committee-passed 2014 defense authorization on Wednesday afternoon. With a long list of amendments expected, the expectation on Capitol Hill is the chamber’s work on the legislation will stretch into Friday. As usual, the floor process will be a long…

After failing to defund the controversial Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) in the Pentagon’s 2013 budget, the House Armed Services Committee is trying to scuttle the missile defense program again this year in its version of the 2014 Pentagon budget bill passed on June 5. While the Senate reversed the House’s desire to slash…